Crazy Brave

In the book Crazy Brave by Joy Hardin, the author addresses the important issue of domestic abuse. Joy illustrates her experiences with abuse that start in her childhood and occur again once she is an adult. There seemed to be many similar occurrences in several examples of women being abused in the book. For example, most of the men who were abusive towards their wives seemed only to be that way due to oppression from society or due to example from their elders. The men would come home and beat their wives after a “hard day at work” or because “that’s how they were raised.” Although the underlying issues seems to be the main reason the men were abusive; alcohol acted as a stimulus in the men’s’ anger. It always seemed that as long as alcohol intertwined with the men’s’ anger that the abuse would come forward and wouldn’t stop until sobriety. The women mostly accepted this behavior because they either loved their husbands or they were women and had nowhere else to go. Social circumstances seem to be the main reason the women won’t leave their men. It would be more difficult for a woman in this time period, especially an Indian woman, to be able to gain social prestige. This would be difficult because men were always superior to women, especially white men, in Joy Hardin’s case. Another difficulty was that in this time period that women “escaping” their husbands seemed to be absurd. The lack of shelters for women and government help kept the women in their homes. Luckily, as time went on domestic abuse was recognized and taken under control.